If you are looking to build a business website or even a personal website to showcase your hobbies or interests, Weebly can help you accomplish your goals with very little technical knowledge on your part – we’ll discuss this in great depth in this Weebly review.

Weebly is a drag and drop website builder, so you literally drag website building blocks (such as a picture or a paragraph) into your screen when you are building a website.

By far, Weebly is the easiest website builder to use. It’s very user-friendly and intuitive to use – you don’t have to know any codes at all and you can still build a good website.

Feedback from Weebly users is that they are very satisfied with building websites with Weebly given it’s comprehensive website building tools, ease of use, at very affordable prices (free for most people).

Weebly currently powers over 25 million websites, equivalent to more than 2% (and growing) of the websites on the internet are currently run on Weebly – that’s very impressive considering there are a lot of websites across the entire internet!

WEEBLY REVIEW - TOP 3 PROS AND CONS

One of the easiest and user friendly drag & drop website builder in the market – They don’t overwhelm you excessive number of tools, but all the strong basics to build a functional website. Weebly’s user interface is very intuitive to use, which is good for all levels of users. You can literally build a good website in less than an hour.

Free to use - Weebly’s free platform provides you enough tools to build a functional website (even when you’re not paying a dime, which is awesome). There is no pressure to upgrade to the paid platform, but only if you want to. No credit card information is required to sign up for a free account, and there is no time limit to the free account – you can use it forever if you want to.

Broad range of templates allows you to build a professional looking website. You get access to all the templates from Weebly (even with a free account) and they are adding more designs on a regular basis. Weebly also grants you access to their HTML / CSS editor so you can modify the website design as you wish (or hire someone to help you do this). Very flexible indeed.

Not designed for complex e-commerce needs – If you are looking to build an online shop with a lot of products, Weebly’s e-commerce tools are not advanced enough yet to help you manage your online shop needs (such as multiple product displays, inventory tracking, item options, different payment option other than PayPal, customization of emails to confirm orders). However, there are third party shopping carts that you can integrate into a Weebly website to supplement this – Weebly is flexible enough to support this. [See our other website builders for more advanced shopping cart functions][UPDATE - Weebly launched a brand new eCommerce solution in November 2013 which makes their eCommerce features some of the best amongst website builders (click here to see our detailed review)]

Limited number of designer-caliber templates – The quality of Weebly’s templates is relatively average when compared to other website builders. However, they are ramping up their designs and are getting much better at this – so they are improving. There are also third party Weebly templates providers which really help (more on this below). [Wix and Squarespace has much more attractive designer templates. See our Wix vs Weebly review as well.]

Page restrictions for Free and Starter plans – if you were only to use the Free plan, or even the Starter plan (paid), there are page creation restrictions. With the free plan, you can only create up to 5 pages. With the Starter plan, you can only create up to 10 pages. To be able to create unlimited pages, you will need to subscribe to either the Pro or Business plans (more details about Weebly’s pricing plans below). With other website builders, you can create unlimited pages for free (except for Squarespace where their lowest plans allow you to create up to 20 pages, which is still a lot more than Weebly). So if you plan on creating a lot of pages, this is something you should factor into your considerations.

WEEBLY REVIEW VIDEO

IS WEEBLY IS IDEAL FOR YOU?

“Weebly is really easy to use, and suitable for all ranges of businesses, personal sites or e-commerce stores.”

Based on our review, Weebly is ideal for small businesses, photographers, designers, personal websites, online stores.

Essentially, if you want to build a good looking and functional website quickly and painlessly so you can focus on other things, Weebly is a good choice for you.

Weebly is literally the easiest website builder to use in the market at the moment. You don’t need to know how to write any code whatsoever, as Weebly is designed specifically for for you if can’t be bothered to learn code, yet enable you to build your own website with ease.

But if you don know a bit of code, this can definitely be an asset as they allow you to edit your website’s HTML and CSS to make even more customizations if you want to.

IS IT EASY TO USE?

“Building your website is as simple as drag & drop. You can literally watch your own website being built in front of you.”

Weebly is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website builder, meaning you build the entire website right in front of you and what you see when you are building, is what actually shows up after you publish the website.

There is no flipping back and forth between editing mode and preview mode to see how your website will actually look after publishing.

Based no our review, Weebly is one of the most intuitive and easy to use website builders we’ve tested. As mentioned, they don’t offer you all sorts of bells and whistles to try to impress you. They keep it simple, minimalistic and effective, that’s why we like Weebly.

TEMPLATE DESIGN OPTIONS

“Weebly has been releasing new, stylish design templates – enabling you to create professional looking websites.”

Weebly started off with mediocre design templates a few years ago, and users have consistently requested that Weebly “upgrade” the quality of their templates.

Weebly also gives you access to their HTML / CSS editor so if you want, you can also customize the website’s design there (or hire someone to help you). It’s a very nice option to have if you really want a customized design.

Based on our experiences and users feedback, Weebly’s support team is responsive and will answer all emails. They have a small team that is servicing a very large group of users, so be patient on the response time. Additional support channels include posting your questions on their Facebook page or even contacting them via Twitter.

[Update- Weebly recently introduced live chat service in which is accessible through their Support Center, so you to ask them questions on the spot which is great. Although this service is only available from Monday to Friday, 11am – 9pm Eastern Standard Time, this is a much needed support which shows that they are starting to dedicate even more resources to supporting Weebly users.]

Weebly also now offer phone support which is very helpful as well. They didn’t have this before but given their growth spurt and to remain competitive with other website builders such as Wix (who also offer phone support), this is a very positive initiative for Weebly.

Based on or experiences and review, Weebly is responsive when it comes to supporting their users. They don’t have the capacity to handhold each person (such as one-on-one phone calls), but given Weebly’s existing support services, friendly and intuitive user interface, you really don’t have to be a technical guru use Weebly proficiently.

Weebly Tutorial Resources

Weebly also has an online Support Center which is basically a “How To Guide” to use their tools to build your website.

If you want to learn a few more advanced tips and tricks, DivTag Templates has interesting Weebly tutorials which you can receive for free. DivTag Templates is a premium Weebly designer templates provider (they’re one of the third party independent Weebly templates provider we mentioned above).

Weebly Community Forum

One of the things that some other website builders have is a community forum, where users can exchange ideas, post questions and find answers to questions that have already been asked. Weebly does not have such a forum yet. It’s a “nice to have”, but not absolutely important when it comes to influencing how good of a website you can build.

WEEBLY MEMBERSHIP CREATION FUNCTION

“Weebly allows you to create your own membership club, where you have full control over who gets to see what pages.”

One of the neat functions that Weebly offers you is the ability to create a membership gateway, so that only your registered members can have access to certain restricted pages (that you have full control of).

This is especially helpful to you if you want to create a private membership club of some sort, share private information with selected members, create courses for students, or just want to block certain content from the general public.

While you might not need this specific function to run your website, it’s something nice to have for sure.

With the Pro plan, you can signup up to 100 members. However, your visitors who want to become members won’t be able to sign up through a registration button on your website. This means that in order for these visitors to become members of your site, you have to invite or add them manually. In our view, while it’s nice that you can have up to 100 membership, these features are really quite limited.

The registration button can either be placed directly on your menu bar, or you can create a pop up box so that when your visitors click on a button or link, a sign up form will appear for them to sign up to become members.

You can either manually or automatically approve each membership application, and you receive a notification email from Weebly once you have a new member sign up.

With the membership function, you can create membership groups, control permissions for pages so that only your members can see certain pages. You can have a dedicated members log in page for your members, and it also comes with basic functions such as password reset.

One thing that’s missing at the moment, is the ability for you to charge your members for a membership fee. Hopefully this is something that will come in future updates!

WEEBLY MOBILE DISPLAY

“Weebly automatically takes your website and creates a mobile version of it. You also get to preview it.”

Weebly offers a “Mobile” function where it takes your website, and automatically compresses it to fit into a mobile phone display. You get to preview your mobile optimized site so you know what your visitors will see, and you also get to drag and drop elements into the mobile editor which is pretty cool.

WEEBLY SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

“Weebly covers all the basic SEO settings – right on par with other website builders.”

We’ve seen arguments that website builders perform very poorly in search engine rankings. However, we have also seen many Weebly websites rank very well in Google (first page rankings) and we have personally built Weebly websites that have also ranked on first pages of search results.

So don’t let others discourage you – just because they can’t do it, doesn’t mean you can’t either! SEO is about planning, technique and persistence, but that’s beyond the scope of this review.

PRICING – IS IT WORTH THE INVESTMENT?

“Weebly enables you to build a website even if you don’t know how to code. You get really great value from Weebly especially if you don’t want to pay a developer thousands of dollars to build a site for you.”

You can use Weebly for free, and have access to all the basic tools you will need to build a website. They don’t impose a time limit if you sign up for a free website, so you can build and have a free website for as long as Weebly is still around!

But if you want to use their Business Plan, upgrade to Weebly Pro or Weebly Starter plan, which gives you access to more features and tools, you have that option as well.

As mentioned under the “Pros & Cons” section above, the free plan only allows you to create up to 5 pages, and the Starter plan allows you to create up to 10 pages. If you subscribe to the Pro or Business plans, you can create unlimited pages.

Currently, you can sign up for Weebly Business for $19.54 per month, Weebly Pro for as low as $6.63 per month or Weebly Starter plan for as low as $3.29 per month, which is about 65 cents per day, 22 cents per day or 11 cents per day, respectively. Not bad considering most people probably spend way more than that on a cup of coffee or chocolate bar everyday.

The Business Plan is decided for for users who want to create a comprehensive e-commerce online store. So if you have plans to build a business and sell products online, Weebly e-Commerce (Business Plan) is an excellent option. See our review on their e-Commerce tools.

WEEBLY REVIEW – CONCLUSION / RECOMMENDATION

Based on our Weebly review, it is our opinion that Weebly is the easiest website builders to use at the moment. Their user interface is minimalistic, so it is designed intentionally to not overwhelm you.

Weebly’s difficulty level is rated as “Low” – it is suitable for users of all technical skill levels (even if you are an absolute beginner).

A good approach is to start with a free website, familiarize yourself with their tools and how easy or difficult it is for you to use Weebly, then make your decision to upgrade or not.

About Jeremy Wong

Maybe just like you, at first we didn't have a darn clue about how to build a website, nevermind write half a line of code if our life depended on it! We wanted to build a website to start a side business, and felt overwhelmed, confused & scared about how to actually do it, which builder to use, and making wrong decisions. After years of trials & errors using different website builders, we're here to share our experiences with you.

Subscribe

About Jeremy Wong

Maybe just like you, at first we didn't have a darn clue about how to build a website, nevermind write half a line of code if our life depended on it! We wanted to build a website to start a side business, and felt overwhelmed, confused & scared about how to actually do it, which builder to use, and making wrong decisions. After years of trials & errors using different website builders, we're here to share our experiences with you.

278 Responses to Weebly Review 2015 – Easiest Way for You to Create Your Website

Hi Jeremy,
I’m considering Weebly for a site to sell my wife’s artisan jewelry. We would use PayPal (and square if Weebly supports it now), so we don’t really need a full ecommerce plan. However, I noticed that Weebly’s Pro plan shows a limit of 25 products. Do you know how they administer that?
In our case we might have a 5 category pages, such as Rings, Necklaces, Bracelets, and a number of items to choose from on each category page. Does the 25 product limit mean that we could only have essentially 5 products on each of the five category pages if we chose the Pro plan?
Thanks so much for all of the helpful information and comparative advice you provide.
Ken

Your site is absolutely impressive, informative, educational, clean and enlightening. I was about to jump on the “Popular Band Wagon” and go with GoDaddy, but I’m so glad I kept researching. So far I really like Weebly. It really fits better with my business.

One thing that I noticed with GoDaddy is the SEO feature. I hear so much about the importance of SEO, does Weebly offer some type of SEO feature like GoDaddy? I believe, if my memory serves me right, that the SEO feature is with the higher plan with GoDaddy.

Regarding SEO, Weebly does not have a plan that helps you get better search rankings, but I’m always a bit leery when it comes to those sort of services. Some work well, but some won’t work at all.

I’ve discussed this in various other pages on our website. When it comes to SEO, a massive part is persistence in creating valuable content that your target audience will find helpful, and promoting your content.

Google has a couple hundred ranking factors and some of the more important ones (according to most industry experts) is engagement – meaning if your content is helpful or not. Google measures this with various metrics, such as how often are your pages shared on social networks, how long your readers stay on your page, how often they return to your site, do they link to your site to endorse your content, etc.

All these are indicators that people are finding your content helpful.

So there’s no shortcuts to this!

Hope this short overview points you in the right direction. But in general, SEO is quite mysterious and I think is a long term game. So keep producing helpful stuff, promote them, and good things are more likely to happen to your website!

Hi, Jeremy,
Thank you SO much for putting together this detailed comparison of website builders–it’s very clear and useful. Several years ago, I built a very small website with Weebly to advertise our home for sale. It sold in a day–a least in part due to Weebly’s ease of use for me, a total newbie. Now, however, our nonprofit organization wants to build a more complex website that will provide information for health care professionals as well as members of the public. We anticipate lots of Q&A, FAQs, and downloadable PDFs; active links to other sites; maybe some interactive space for asking questions; and later an on-line learning area (with additional software added). I know Weebly is easy to use, but I wonder if Squarespace or Wix might be better for our current purposes. We don’t need flashy appearance, but we do need easy navigation! Which would you recommend? Thanks!

I think all of those website builders will be able to handle more content and downloadable PDFs. The only wrinkle is Q&A, but you can always set up commenting systems (like how we’re interacting here!) so people can ask questions and get answers.

There is a free commenting widget called Disqus that you can just plug into your website and start using it.

The only drawback with these drag and drop web builders is that if you want to integrate a website with another software, then it may or may not work well.

I’m not entirely sure if Cloudflare works with Weebly or not, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to try. Cloudflare is quite popular as it provides free CDN to websites to help speed up its loading speed. I think it should work most of the time, but best to benchmark the before and after impact on load time.

Before trying it, I would suggest you optimize all your images on your website. So resize all your images to the dimension that you want it to be displayed on your pages (so don’t insert a massive image then use Weebly’s drag & drop tools to shrink it down to a smaller size, as Weebly will still load the massive image, even when displaying a smaller size).

Also run the images through an image compressor such as Kraken (free) to reduce the file size so your pages will load faster.

I am new to weebly. I signed up and wanted to try out a website at weebly for free. When I tried to publish it weebly would not let me. It kept telling me that I needed to verify my account and give me the page where you put your email and password in. I put my info in again and try to publish and same thing happen. I thought you could try weebly out without paying. Do I have to pay in order to publish?

You can definitely publish a website for free (without paying). I think perhaps Weebly is trying to have their users verify their information, as there might be a lot of people building a lot of sites using their platform for spamming.

But once you verify your information, you should be able to publish. In this case, try reaching out to their support team to see what the issue is.

I currently have a website provided by lawyers.com that uses Weebly templates that are 5 years old. I want access to all the new responsive templates that Weebly has for only $8 per month. I can export my domain to GoDaddy (do you recommend them) or wherever, but I have to re-do the site from scratch. I am told by Weebly that their zip backup function does not let you reload into a new Weebly site. Any way around this? Seems crazy you export your site, but can’t use it on their service.

Other question I have is- should I let lawyers.com simply redirect my site to weebly and let them keep my webmail or just switch everything to goDaddy and use Weebly gmail for 5 bucks a month.

You can transfer your domain name to GoDaddy for about $15 or so, which includes 1 year of annual fee, so it’s a good way to allow you to manage your domain name there.

Yes – I think you’ll have to build your site from scratch again if you want to use Weebly as currently there isn’t a way to import a website into Weebly. Hopefully they’ll have this added to their platform sooner rather than later!

I’d recommend you migrate everything out of your existing platform if you want to start fresh. You probably don’t want to have all sorts of different pieces lying around so to speak. Weebly’s recommends that you use Google Business Apps to power your email, which is basically the gmail interface. We use Google Business App to power our email and we like it quite a bit. It’s easy to use and very stable.

Thanks for the reply. That is what I thought, but wanted another opinion. Anyways- I purchased a Drops Template and have started building a new website. So far it looks nice, only problem is it much slower than my old website. Can you or someone at your company take a look at my new website to give me some ideas on why pagescoring.com says it takes so long to load? I tried compressing my images, but building websites ain’t my thing.

A common mistake is that a user will insert a very large image, and use the Weebly image tool to shrink the image to display a smaller size. But when the page loads, it still loads the full size of the image.

So a tip is to size the image to the right dimension before uploading it into your website.

Also try using an image compressor such as Kraken which is what we use to significantly shrink the sizes of images without compromising the quality too much.

I have my current website with Homestead. (UGH) I’ve been with them for years. The site is about 150 pages. If and when I switch to Weebly, I know that its going to be very difficult. And I’m not really referring to the 150 pages. I know that I’ll have to set up each page one at a time.
I can handle that. But mostly what I am referring to is the “transfer” process. Is it really that difficult? I’ve read a lot where Homestead gives people a lot of trouble and headaches when you try to leave them. I have my domain there too! I would like to switch everything over to Weebly. Is there any advice you can give me in dealing with Homestead.

Also, I really wouldn’t use any of the pre-formed templates. I always start from a “blank page.” Can I start with a blank page on Weebly?

I haven’t really used or have extensive experience with Homestead, so I can’t quite comment on how challenging it is to leave them. But you can definitely transfer your domain name to another domain name registrar such as GoDaddy, and connect your domain name to your Weebly site. The transfer process should only take a couple of days and is a one time fee (around $12 or so and it also includes 1 year’s worth of registration fee).

Regarding “blank” templates, Weebly doesn’t have any of that. So you might have to pick the most bland / basic template and start from there. But you do have full access to their template’s codes so if you know some code you can really have a ton of design control there.

If you really prefer to start with a blank template, you should check out Wix as they do offer you this option (no design whatsoever, and you can start from scratch). It might be worth your time to sign up for a test / free account to see if you prefer that.

hi I am new to all of this and i am just starting my own small business. I have a page on facebook but I am finding people want a website to go to. So i want to create one but am confused on which way to go. I have started a party food platter business. So I have pictures,prices and info. Can you please with any suggestions how to go about it?

Weebly is definitely one of the easiest drag and drop builders to help you build your website. You don’t need to know any code and can drag in text, images, slideshows, etc. And Weebly helps you host your website so you don’t have to worry about all that technical stuff.

One thing to consider is that if you are selling products, you may want to link up your online store with your Facebook page. But Weebly doesn’t have a feature for this yet and you’ll have to keep both your Facebook store and your website store separate.

But there are a few other website builders that can link up your Facebook store with your online web store so it’s easier to manage. Here is more discussion about how to do that if you’re interested.

I’ve just stumbled across Weebly by chance today, and have a couple of questions….

Firstly, with regards to the security option which appears to be available only to those opting for the pro or business package, what risk may this pose for those opting initially for the starter option, without security?

Secondly, is it suitable for UK customers? – due to time difference, is the helpline chat service accessible 24/7 or would he have to access the service during the night, UK local time?

The security feature (SSL certificate) is only applicable when visitors are in the shopping cart page where they are inserting private / sensitive information when making purchases. So in a sense that is only available and applicable if you are running an online store.

So this feature is available across the Starter, Pro and Business plans – As long as your visitors are in the shopping cart area. When your visitors are in other pages of your site, the security feature won’t be necessary as no confidential information will be passed.

As for support, I think Weebly’s main method of support is via email and so you can reach them around the clock. Obviously during busier times (most likely weekdays) it will take them a bit of time to get back to you (usually within a day I believe, unless the issue is quite technical and they need to escalate it to another dedicated department).

Hi Jeremy, here’s my question; I am starting my own copywriting business and obviously need a professional looking website to showcase my work. What if I have my own picture (its part of my logo) that I want as the picture on my homepage. I am having trouble finding a template that would be a good representation of a writing business. To make matters worse, I am so computer illiterate it’s not funny. I really “need” this to work. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Any of Weebly’s plans will allow you to set up 3 – 4 webpages. So you can either use their Free, Starter, Pro or Business plans. Of course each level of plan gives you different tools / features. The higher the plan, the more features are available for you to use.

Hello,
I created my website through Weebly back in September I believe. My younger sister had Cystic Fibrosis a terminal lung disease and was able to Make-A-Wish. She received a concession trailer that she could take to fairs and festivals to make money. Unfortunately, she passed away before she was able to take it anywhere but my mother and I decided to keep it and start an LLC to keep KK’s legacy alive. I’m paralyzed from chest down so I handle all the business, marketing, accounting and so on. I’m not very experienced with creating websites and such my sister was and I just don’t know what to do with the website. We need it so events can see what we offer and the story behind our operation but I don’t think it’s the best it can be.

Thanks for sharing and I’m really sorry to hear about the loss of your sister. My deepest condolences to you and your family, and it’s great how you’re keeping your sister’s legacy alive, despite your health issues.

I think Weebly is a good choice to build your website as I think they’re the most user friendly drag and drop website builder in the market right now. You can quickly create pages, and in my experience the most frequently used tools to build a decent website is simply images, titles and text.

Cassidy,
The wonderful thing about Weebly as Jeremy mentioned it is very simple and you can pretty much design a similar site like pretty much anything out there. I use DivTag Templates for my client websites and they love them. I have tried other builders to compare, and I have yet to find one that is simple and flexible. I would suggest finding a site you like and then make it look as close as possible to it and when you are done you will be surprised at your finished product.

I even use Weebly for our company site, http://www.thelabdesigngroup.com. With some of the new tweaks and plugins that DivTag provide as well as other codes that can be implemented the next version coming out in a couple of months will look awesome.

It’s hard to say. I think it’s best if you sign up for both Squarespace and Weebly and to play with their website building features to see which one you prefer.

I think you should place more emphasis on the actual website building platform first, before deciding if the design templates are suitable for you. Because even if Squarespace’s design templates are really good looking, if you really don’t think their platform is suitable for your needs, then there’s no reason why you should stick with them even if their templates look awesome.

Yes you can definitely do that with Weebly. You can set up 2 (or more) pages if you want to. They have a “contact form” element that you can drag and drop into your page and you can configure what sort of question you want your visitors to fill out. Then you can connect that form to your email address of choice so you get notified whenever someone fills in the form!

Hi Jeremy, Can the contact form be used to get customers to sign up for a newsletter (it’s a pity that one cannot use weebly to send out newsletters, but that’s a different story). A related question to the above: Is there an upper limit on the number of customers who can interact using the contact list (based on the plan that one signs up for)? Thanks. John.

There isn’t a way to link up Weebly’s contact form with a newsletter service. But what you can do is sign up with a newsletter service provider (such as Aweber), and Aweber allows you to create a sign up form and you can embed that form into your Weebly site.

Once you design the form in Aweber, they will provide you with a code. Just paste that code into the Embed Code element from Weebly and place that into your webpage, and the sign up form will appear where your visitors can sign up to your newsletter.

As far as I know, there are no limits to how many times your visitors can use your contact form on your website.

The problem with the rates on the Compare Plans page for Weebly is that they do not tell the entire story. You only get the $19.54 / month rate if you commit to a two-year term, and pay all of it UP FRONT. NO WHERE on their Compare Plans page do they have an (*) asterisk pointing to the terms and conditions of their $19.54 / month rate. It’s the same for the other prices too: you have to commit to one or two years to get the rate. While “buy in bulk pricing” is a fairly common practice, what’s misleading is that you don’t know what the actual rates are until you get to the checkout page. They Compare Plans page ONLY shows you the discounted rate without any disclaimers or terms and conditions. While this may be an oversight, it feels misleading. Weebly needs to correct this.

I understand what you’re saying. But right on TOP of the Compare Plans button, is a button labelled “Upgrade Your Site”. Once you click on that button, Weebly shows you all the pricing options, including 6 month plan, 1 year plan and 2 year plan. They also show you the total amount you need to pay, depending on which plan you select.

So from my perspective, it’s pretty transparent. All the prices are clearly laid out before you insert your credit card information, so there aren’t any hidden fees at all.

So from my own perspective, there isn’t any misleading activities here. Just my own opinion

Currently Weebly doesn’t give you a free domain name when you upgrade to any of their plans. So if you want to use Weebly (they’re really easy to use to build websites), you’ll need to purchase our own domain name from domain name registrars such as GoDaddy.

Or else there are other website builders (such as Squarespace or Wix) that will give you a free domain name for 1 year, if you upgrade to their annual plans. You can see more discussions about Squarespace here, and about Wix here.

Hello,
The comparison plan for Weebly packages gives me unlimited pages for free and starter packages; In your overview i see it limited to 5 pages? Has this changend recently or is there a regional difference?

Weebly recently updated their free and subscription plans. So what we’re showing above is the latest for people who newly sign up for an Weebly account. You get 5 pages under the free plan, 10 pages with the Starter plan, and unlimited pages for Pro and Business plans.

But if you’ve signed up for a Weebly account BEFORE they updated their plans, then you’re probably “grandfathered” into the older plan, where you get unlimited pages for all plans. So make sure you don’t cancel your account!

Hiya,
We were signed up to GoDaddy website builder but it didn’t have the membership option that Weebly appears to have. We were looking to be hosted by HostGator and on their control panel you have the Weebly builder option. I am getting confused as to who I need to pay what to! I need SSL certificate, our choice of merchant, membership log ins and databases to back this up, info on website useage etc, webmail, and also it would be useful to be able to show members basic details on our website. I was going to use Joomla but I am not a techy and a click and drop would be easier! Do I split the hosting and the webbuilder or do can I get everything I want from Weebly? Thanks!

It sounds like you need more features than what most drag and drop web builders will be able to offer you. Weebly does offer membership gateway, but you won’t have access to databases, webmail, usage data for each member, etc. I think you’ll need a much more powerful software to be able to do that.

With Weebly, you can create a functional / simple membership login, but there is no access for you to modify / edit the database, nor do they allow you to track what each member has done on what page.

Also, I’m not sure if Hostgator’s version of Weebly has membership functions yet. “Non-Weebly” hosts tend to be a bit behind in features, so that’s why using Weebly.com directly is always a suggested option as you get all the latest features.

Hi, Thanks for all this great information. Basically I just like to take pictures as a hobby and want some where for my family/friends to be able to go look. I much prefer to pay for a year in advance than have to deal with the monthly payment coming out each month, so does Weebly offer that? And can people save the images off the website to their computers (like right click save image as)? Last question, it offers the create your domain, but does that have weebly name in it or is it your own personal one?
Thanks,
Kate.

Yes will can help you build a site where you can share your pictures / content with others!

If you want to upgrade to one of their paid plans (which allows you to connect your own personal domain name to the website), you can either pay in 6 months, 1 year or 2 years increments. The longer the plan you sign up with, the steeper the discount that they will offer you. So the 2 year plan is the cheapest on a per month basis. Here is more discussions about their subscription plans.

And yes, others can save images off your website if they want to. But if you don’t want your images to be saved, there is a short snippet of code that you can save on to your pages so that others can’t save your images (if you don’t want to share them).

For your last question, as mentioned in my comment above, you can connect your own domain name to your Weebly site (provided that you upgrade to at least their Starter plan). So there won’t be any Weebly advertisements / text on your website or domain name!

Hi! Thank you for this review. I’ve been thinking about creating two Weebly websites. One would be a re-make of our current website that is verrry difficult for non-tech people to use. I need something very user friendly so my colleagues can post and change their pages quickly and regularly. Here’s my question. What would be the fastest way for me to transfer the information from my existing website to a new Weebly website? I don’t want to spend countless hours re-typing everything.

Unfortunately there isn’t an automated way to import content into Weebly. So you will have to invest a bit of time to make the migration by copying and pasting the content into Weebly and setting things up.

You can always outsource this work so at least someone can get the content into the site, then you can play around with the formatting to finish things off. Check out Fiverr.com to see if you can find any freelancers for this.

This is an excellent place to create a website. I had no idea what I was doing but Dave P, Jonathan C. Jayme, and Kacey C where SO HELPFUL and amazing! They took there time with me and answered my 8 million questions I had for them. They never rushed me and they take pride in giving you excellent customer service. They sent me great information that was also very helpful. I loved setting up the website and I love my website! I have already told so many friends about this great service and their incredible customer service. Thank you Weebly friends for your help and taking time with me! You have my 5 stars!

hie jeremy…thank you for such a post…..i loved it..i would like to
ask you this thing ….i am in the process of creating a music site
where people get to download some of my songs as well as my
friends’…..will weebly allow me to upload my songs on the site as
well as offer me with the download and the play buttons..maybe an
information button as well….thank you in advance

Hi Jeremy, thank you so much for making a difficult decision in choosing a website builder easier with your fantastic breakdown.

I am very happy with my choice in Weebly, but I am also frustrated in that when I click on the mobile device view, it looks nothing like the desktop view. It doesn’t look like they are synching up at all, other than the copy is the same. Whenever I try to edit anything in the mobile view (Changing images and fonts), I get kicked back to the desktop view.

Also, when I click on the”Image Header” button on the right, it doesn’t “slide” to the on position. I have checked all their articles for troubleshooting and have emailed their support team and am still waiting for an answer. Just wondering if there is a solution to this, and if anyone else has experienced this glitch. Or maybe I’ve overlooked something. Thanks again for all your time.
~ Darryl

Weebly’s mobile editor hasn’t been the biggest hit to be quite honest (at least based on a lot of feedback from Weebly users that we’ve seen). The biggest complaint is that there is really no difference between the desktop editor and the mobile editor – I suspect it’s similar to what’s frustrating you?

I think this is why Weebly started introducing mobile responsive templates which is what the web design industry has been heavily endorsing. In fact, Weebly just released 2 more new responsive templates today!

Mobile responsive templates is a “smart” way for templates to configure itself to display optimally on mobile devices of different sizes. Plus you don’t have to mess around and worry about how your website is designed. The responsive nature of the template should automatically figure out how t place your content on a mobile device.

Thanks for responding. The problem really is that the image and fonts that I chose for the home page on the desktop view change into a completely different image and font when I click on the mobile view. It doesn’t match at all from one to the other. I understand the layout will be altered to fit the screens of mobile devices, that fine. The frustrating thing is that I am not able to change either the image or font while in the mobile view, and when I have tried it sends me back to the desktop view, where the image and font is fine and doesn’t need to be changed. You can see my confusion. Maybe I should try and publish it and see what happens?

Yes that does sound very frustrating. But if you haven’t published your site yet, you should try so you can see what actually shows up on your live site, in addition to what you’re seeing on your preview screen.

Hi Jeremy!
First of all thank you! Good thing i stumble upon your website, it really clarify a lot of uncertainties for someone who is just starting out to build an online e-commerce website. Unfortunately not all website builders offer their e-commerce services in my country. I live in Malaysia may I know which e-commerce website builder can be used here? I’m also thinking of using weebly for my personal blog would it be helpful to subscribe to any of the plans?
Thanks again!

I found your blog accident. Its great!.I was almost about to go with square space. Then I read your blog. I was bummed when I found out square space only offers on payment option. A fee questions for you

1 Which site builder offers the most flexible payment options (Paypal Ect)
2 Which builder offers the option for customer to create an account to track their orders view order history ect
3 Which site builder offers the inventory management tool such as automatically send email once orders are received and marked as shipped
4 Apart from square which builder offers good full page templates

I just wanted to let you know that you have certainly made my decision easy in choosing a Website builder. The information you provide is excellent and easily presented for novices like myself. Well done!!

After paying a monthly fee for a generic site that looked like thousands of others, three years ago I took the plunge and decided Weebly was my best option for building my own site. If you want to look at it you can go to ‘www.DoctorSchierling.com and check it out. Make sure to check out the blog as well.

Weebly is easy to use and while their Customer Service is not necessarily Johnny-on-the-spot with answering your questions, they always get back to you within 24 hours. I have absolutely no beef with them whatsoever. My only question is about their SEO. I always wonder if they could be doing more for my SEO (or for that matter, if I could be doing more to boost my own SEO). I would love to see them offer an advanced tutorial on this subject (maybe you could put in a good word).

My numbers are excellent and improving month by month, but because some of aspects of SEO are somewhat confusing and ‘mysterious’, I always wonder how much better they could be.

Regarding SEO, I guess the general thought is that if you’re not ranked at the top of search queries on search engines, you can always do better!

I’d agree that SEO is a very complex matter and Google is always updating its search algorithm. And it’s an ongoing process, similar to spending money on marketing advertisements. It’s never a “set it and forget it” type of approach.

One of my favorite approaches is to keep inserting interesting and valuable content in your blog to further your reach on the search results. People are always searching for a lot of different content online and so you can really expand your reach there. Not to mention the social sharing aspect of things.

Hi Jeremy,
I am trying to help a friend with is charity. It is an animal rescue and while he currently has a website, the man who built is no longer working and so we don’t have anyone to finish the site or maintain it. I think we are at the point of building our own. We need something pretty simple that we can post pictures and stories of the animals. He also has a paypal account with it for donations. Is Weebly something we can use for this? He has very limited computer abilities and I know how to navigate my own site–which was built for me by someone in our industry–but I am not sure about building one for this job. It sounds good with drag and drop. Does this mean we can use Word docs as a base and copy them in and use pictures and video from our cameras and phones to post to the website?
Thanks!

Weebly is probably one of the easiest drag and drop website builders around, and is quite suitable for those who are not web or technically savvy! You can literally drag and drop text and image elements into your website, then insert your own text, image, videos, etc. So it’s quite intuitive to use even for amateurs!

Hello Jeremy, you’ve probably answered this already, but didn’t see it so here we go; for each product that I sell it has a number of different attributes, and each attribute has a list of items (such as in a pull-down menu) to be selected by the customer. Can I create those attributes and lists in Weebly? And, how are they accessed, by a database such as SQL or just a created list that can easily be changed, added to, and sorted?
Thanks!

With Weebly’s ecommerce tools, you can set up product variants so that you can have different variations of the same product (such as different colors of t-shirts).

See our discussion on Weebly’s ecommerce tools for more information (under the Multiple Product Variants section). You can play around with the tool in Weebly as you can access it even if you have a free Weebly site, to see if you are happy with that tool.

Hi Jeremy, Great information and this is probably going to sound goofy but do these sites publish the websites or do I have to do that myself? I am a midwife looking to get away from the humdrum of 1&1. I am not a web developer but live on nothing and need a sharp website. I cannot tell if these design sites are also hosts.

Hi Jeremy, I’ve been using Weebly for some time, but I’ve always been baffled at the fact that I’m limited to using only 5 pages. When I searched up why there was a restriction, I couldn’t a single article talking about it. Most other users and bloggers I know have unlimited pages, so why don’t I? I don’t mean to come off as rude, but it’s quite frustrating! Your review was very helpful to me in all other aspects though!

Actually, I do use weebly directly from Weebly.com (I log in through weebly), but I still have that 5 page limit. It tells me when I try to add new pages, “The Free plan is limited to 5 pages. Please upgrade to add more.” The upgrade link takes me to their Starter, Pro, and Business.

Weebly does limit new free account users to 5 pages per site as they are testing it out but aren’t committed to permanently doing that per support answer I received. Those who have had free accounts before they did this still have unlimited pages.

also weebly live chat is available on weekends not just mon-friday as I used live chat today at 1pm ET

I am planning to start my online store soon, and have a specific design in mind for the background. I have next to no knowledge of coding. Does Weebly allow users to upload their own background designs? If not, are there any other website builders that can allow me to do this?

Some selective Weebly themes (the newest ones) do allow you to upload your own background image. You can always sign up for a free account and check out the themes if it is a critical part of your design.

Most other website builders also have themes that will allow you to upload your own background image(s). These include Squarespace, Wix or Jimdo. You can see a comparison chart between them here if you haven’t heard about them before.

Hey Jeremy…I’m really new at build’g a website but I seem to be managing ok with Weebly, just upgraded to their Business Plan (start’g an Ecommerce Business). I Published it to see how it looks on the Web and it still has the .weebly.com (ending) after the name I gave it. Been reading your post below & a few said that you have “to connect your own custom domain name”. How do you do that?

Not sure what that means because in the begin’g, I gave the Site a “NAME”, worked on the Site, Upgraded then Published it…I read in the comparison price list (rolled over custom domain name) and saw that I would get a yourname.com (no weebly.com) in the Business Package.

So Just to be clear, even though I upgraded to Business, I still don’t get my own yourname.com. I did find on Weebly that you can purchase a domain for $70.00. I thought I had a Domain Name when I 1st named the Site in Weebly? So to get rid of yourname.weebly.com…I have to pay MORE MONEY or can I connect a custom domain name ??? Please help me…Hope I didn’t confuse you.

I don’t think that Weebly gives you a free domain name even if you upgrade to their paid plans. You will have to purchase one yourself and GoDaddy is a good place to start looking for your own custom domain name.

By upgrading to a paid Weebly plan, Weebly allows you to have a custom domain name, but I don’t think they give you a free one.

I haven’t used Blogger before so I can’t quite comment here. If others reading this have used Blogger before please feel free to add to this discussion!

Generally, while Weebly is extremely easy to use, I wouldn’t say that they have the best blogging features ever. But they do have all the basics you need to get a blog going, and again, they’re really easy to use!

sir ,
I am Looking forward to build a website through weebly but before that i have some queries,So i would be very grateful if you clear my doubts
1. is it i get free domain for website with plan
2. is can we add Flash files to Website like SWF
3.is can we make available to see website on mobile also is any feature for that
Kindly guide me in this regards and if its there and which plan will cover this feature.

1) You don’t get a free domain so you will have to purchase one yourself. A good domain name registrar is GoDaddy. If you want a website builder that gives you a free domain name if you upgrade to their premium plans, you should check out Squarespace or Wix.

2) Yes you can. Weebly has an element where you can use it to upload your flash file.

I’ve been reading reviews for hours now and I must admit my head is spinning a little. I think I’ve decided that Weebly is my best option for creating a basic website for my band.

Here’s the question: Can I start on Weebly’s free plan, build the website and then If I like how it works, upgrade to the starter plan and redirect the domain name that I own through GoDaddy without having to rebuild the site?

Thank you for your great and nice review. It’s helpful. I saw other reviews and comparison that you posted. I learned a lot from you. I have a question as a beginner. According to what I understood, there are two types of website builders: 1. builder+web hosting integrated (Wix, Weebly) and 2. builder of web hosting companies (goDaddy, Bluehost). You need to pay monthly fee for both of them. The website builders of web hosting companies like goDaddy or Bluehost are the same type of builders as Wix and Weebly? Why on the Internet people only compare among builders of Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and so on which doesn’t require you to have a hosting already? Is it because those builders of goDaddy or Bluehost are very different types from Wix or Weebly? Or they are much poorer and so don’t interest people than Wix or Weebly?

Our website mainly discusses the pros and cons of hosted website builders (such as Weebly, Squarespace, Wix, etc), as those are the software that we used when we first built our websites a few years ago!

We were also looking for good reviews but weren’t able to find any – this is what inspired us to create this website so others can benefit from our experiences and discussion as well!

There is not right or wrong website builders (including the hosted ones or the ones where you have to get your own hosting such as WordPress.org). It’s really a matter of personal preference, and whether the website builder suits your needs!

Hello Jeremy wong… can i make a blog on weeby through which i can advertise? i want to make a blog to collect some affliates for my self such as refferals…. i want to make this blog about PTC sites and online data entry jobs…

ok thanks… i will not get ban in future on weebly? because i have a blog on blogger which was blocked by the blogger for spamming… i dont know what kind of spamming was that… i was just using it for advertisment and promotion of my PTC sites..

For that you will have to clarify if what you’re promoting is in violation with Weebly’s terms of services or not. Very generally speaking, if you are just advertising “normal” products in an ethical way that is not in violation of any laws or Weebly’s terms, then you should be okay.

If you are promoting or creating content that are in violation, such as adult content, hate content, etc, you may want to review the terms of services carefully.

I’m not a legal professional so what I suggested is my own view and doesn’t represent, imply or describe what Weebly’s terms of services say. So best to review their terms, consult with them if necessary, and exercise good judgement!

I was wondering if weebly allows a ‘landing page or sales page’ where visitors can optin to receive emails or watch a sales video? Similar to the advertise you have above this comment section. “Top 8 Tools …”

I think so. You just have to create a new page and insert your opt-in form there (assuming you are using some sort of auto responder, which will give you some codes to embed into your site). You can use Weebly’s “embed code” element to embed your opt-in form.

I have now built my whole website on Weebly, having spent a while researching all the different options, and definitely found weekly to be by far the easiest one to use! (Wix is pretty easy too, but they still have a fair way to go with different functions, esp related to commerce…)

SO, I am just clarifying, if I want to use e-commerce, can I use the free site?
Or is it that I can use the free one but I need to have ‘mysitename.weebly.com’ rather than just my site name?
And the free one does not allow for freight charges to be added, correct? For this I must go to a business package?
And free site, Credit card payments can be made but not PayPal?

Thanks for your guidance, some bits about e-commerce aren’t that clear, you have to go through the steps to find if you can or can’t do something…

I believe you can still use the ecommerce tools even if you are using the free version of Weebly, but you are limited to only selling 10 product items, and there is a 3% transaction fee for time you sell something.

And you won’t be able to connect your own custom domain name to the website (you will need to at least sign up for the Weebly Starter Plan to connect your own domain name).

Digital goods, inventory management and shipping & tax are only available to Business Plan users. You can checkout our discussion on different Weebly pricing plans here.

Ideally I guess I’d want the business package but it seems quite pricey for hosting (my last website hosting was only $80/year and that included credit cards and Paypal) but I guess the weekly hosting is where you end up paying for the website building platform…as oppose to a non-CMS site….

The last thing-SORRY so many questions -is that when I go right through to the payment sign up to accept credit cards (through STRIPE) it wants me to sign off on allowing them to access my bank and do direct debits without notification if they deem necessary…I get that more than likely they won’t just take money out but Im not that comfortable with them having full access to my bank account… I would rather be billed for the amounts I owe them and pay them myself… It’s enough for me to go to another hosting company….

Anyway, not sure what you think of this or if anyone else has similar issue/had any problems with this…??

That’s right – Weebly’s fees include the fact that you get to use their drag and drop platform, that you can get your website built fairly quickly and painlessly.

As for Stripe, I think they just need access to make deposits directly into your account. I haven’t heard of any bad stories, as if they abused the privilege they would be out of business pretty quickly!

Stripe was recently announced as one of the top 50 disruptors of the industry by CNBC (meaning that they are one of the top 50 businesses that are changing the industry landscape), and are giving PayPal some competition. So they’re definitely a legit company.

and have access to all the basic tools you will need to build a website. They don’t impose a time limit if you sign up for a free website, so you can build and have a free website for as long as Weebly is still around!

Thanks for the thorough review. I am looking to build a website where I will post stories and articles daily, with a comment section available for each article. I am not very tech-savvy, so the ease of use is why I originally thought Weebly was the best site for this to be built on, but I would like to hear your thoughts. You mentioned that there is no feature available on Weebly to sort articles by “Most Popular” or “Most Relevant,” are those features available on other website builders? Thanks for your time!

Unfortunately I don’t think Weebly has a way to “automatically” generate a most popular / relevant list of blog posts. What you can do is categorize each blog post and the category will show up on the right column of your Weebly blog. So you can manually categorize some blog posts as popular / relevant. It’s not the best, automated solution but it is somewhat of a workaround (though not a perfect one).

Squarespace also has a similar function (categorizing or tagging blog posts) but again, it’s not an automated function that you see offered by very strong blogging platforms such as WordPress.

Hi Jeremy,
It was great reading your reviews on the best website builders out there.

I run a small advertising company in the Middle East and am planning to expand our business into the web world. My current requirement, requires me to build the sites in bilingual format. Arabic and English, Question: Does Weebly and SquareSpace support Arabic fonts and typing methods? Who else is there that I can rely on for this?

The CMS option from Weebly looks really great with the ability to customize it and make it your own.

I was trying out the forms feature for weebly and found that I cant change the email address to which a form is being send to, in respone to a change in selection on a drop down list. Eg. If I run a restaurant and I want to provide my customers with an online order system based on forms and emails. It would be great if they could choose the branch from the dropdown list and the email will be send to the brach email address that was selected from the drop-downlist. Weebly does not have this feature. Is it possible to do this by editing and adding the codes ourselves.

What kind of services do you provide in the weebly platform and otherwise?

When you are in Weebly Editor and click into the contact form element, look on the left hand side and you should see more contact form dedicated elements that you can drag and drop into the contact form (such as drop down boxes, check boxes, option buttons, etc). So you do have a bit of flexibility here.

In terms of Arabic fonts, I’ve seen some users manage to do this before, so I’m sure it’s possible. Might need a bit of tweaking in the template codes though.

Great review – I have 2 websites with weebly:
‘www.melissachoroszewska.com – for my ceramics and
‘www.gmcweddings.co.uk for my wedding styling and centerpiece hire business in Devon and Cornwall.
I personally find weebly easy to use and when you get to grips with it you can add some nice features. I recommend weebly to my students as an easy to use website builder.

Glad you liked the review! We always feel that Weebly is a great place to start building websites due to it’s simple user interface (drag and drop) where one can quickly build a website and get projects going (instead of getting stuck with technology). That was definitely our own experience a few years ago.

Having said that, you’re right, Weebly isn’t perfect (no web builders are) and eventually if you want more advanced functions and more customizability, more powerful CMS such as WordPress is definitely an option. By then, presumably some users will feel more comfortable with online technology to dive into a steeper learning curve!

We’ve always advocated finding the right technology for the right purpose. So if Weebly’s tools are sufficient, and that ease of use and getting projects off the ground quickly are important points, Weebly can be very fantastic in those regards!

Hello, Jeremy,
I am new customer. tried to operate very new website in Weebly. But, I have very little Technical skill. How can I build my website. My other question is that, i am based in china. Is that fine I can used weebly to operate here. Also, i want to make very professional website for my Travel Agent . so, did you help me to operate excellent website.

If you are learning to use Weebly, they have some tutorials here where you can learn how to get started.

But in general, Weebly is one of the easiest website builders we’ve seen and used – their ease of use is one of their strongest competitive advantage. So you just have to invest a little bit of time and I’m sure you can get the hang of it pretty quickly. Just drag and drop elements to your page and start inserting your own content.

You should be able to use Weebly in China just fine. You can change the language on their website to Chinese. But I don’t think Weebly has any support team based in China. If you are looking for a website builder that has a Chinese support team, check out Jimdo, as they have a team based in Shanghai, which we’ve met before when we passed through Shanghai. They’re really nice!

Thank you very much for this wonderful review and for all of the information you provide on your site. I am having difficulty and wonder if you might assist.?.

I have an online fabric boutique and have been struggling to find a suitable ecommerce solution. So far in my research I find that I can have either a beautiful site with limited functionality or a mediocre looking site with all of the necessary functionality. I am looking for the following: beautiful templates, email, newsletter, easy set-up/maintenance and the ability to offer free swatches via an “Options” button (I say it this way, as that is what my last provider offered and it was very handy).

I have tried two solutions and I ended up being displeased with both…for the above mentioned reasons. Do you have any suggestions?

Great question. For the free websites for Weebly, you still get unlimited pages and unlimited space. The only drawback is that you won’t be able to connect your own custom domain name to the website. You will have to upgrade to at least the Starter Plan to be able to do that. Here is more discussions on some of their Starter, Pro and Business plans.

Thank you so much for your review. It’s really useful. There are several matters I need to ask since my knowledge about website builder is zero (below zero actually. Lol).

I have plan to build a writer’s website using weebly. My questions are:
1. Is it possible to connect my own domain (from godaddy) to free plan? Or I have to choose at least starter plan?
2. How about the blog feature on free plan or starter plan? Is it good enough writer’s web? As this blog feature is important for writer.
3. For a writer’s web, which one is more suitable, starter plan or higher?

No worries – everybody once started with zero knowledge at some point!

1) You will have to upgrade to at least Weebly’s Starter plan in order to connect your own domain name to the website.

2) The core blogging functions for the free and Starter plan version of Weebly is essentially the same. But if you upgrade to their Starter / Pro / Business plans, you get more general website building tools in which some of them can be used in your blog posts. But they are not specifically created / focused on blogging functions. If that makes any sense!

3) I think Starter plan is a good starting point and you can always upgrade later if you need more features from Pro. You do get some pretty good functions from Pro that you might find helpful such as HD video (if you will be using video), password protecting pages, search bar so your visitors can find your content. Here is a comparison between the plans that you might find helpful.

This review is really helpful. I am looking to start a website for my psychotherapy practice and these reviews have really given me a lot to think about. I’ve been deciding between wix and weebly and this review really makes me think weebIy is what I’m looking for. However, I don’t have any real tech experience so I hope my question isn’t too dumb. Is it okay to purchase the domain name from the same place you host the site?

Or, you can purchase your domain name directly with Weebly after you sign up for a free account with them. It is slightly more expensive than purchasing from GoDaddy, but I suppose there is a convenient factor to that.

Hi,
Firstly I would like to say a BIG thank you on the awesome review of Weebly and other site builders here. I like to know does Weebly provide an email account for any of their plan. I am asking because I want my customers to send inquiry emails to us from my estore.

Check out my comments to Michelle on Feb 25 2014 below. I think that will answer your question about email accounts with Weebly. But to summarize, Weebly doesn’t give you an email account with your own custom domain address, but there are a couple of ways to get what you need.

I have checked out your recommended free email by Microsoft as suggested in your earlier comment to Michelle. This is currently what is written on its site,
“Changes to custom domains with Outlook.com
Outlook.com no longer offers support for new custom domain sign ups. New customers looking to manage custom domains are encouraged to use Office 365, Microsoft’s premium online service, which also includes enterprise-class mail, collaboration and communication tools. ”

It seens that now is no longer free as under the Office 365 small business plan, its lowest plan now cost $5/mth. However it has other features besides email.

With Weebly business plan, will I be able to advertise my products with the likes of Uprice, shopmania, price check etc, as from what I understand is that it needs to have a 1.shopping platform e.g like oscommerce, Virtuemart etc. 2. it needs to accept feed specification in order to build feed.

If you upgrade to a premium plan for Weebly, all your existing content will remain in your website. So you do not have to start from scratch again. All the tools that are only made available on the higher plans will become available to you.

I use Weebly for my site and it’s exactly as you say..easy to use and it looks good.
The message for anybody out there thinking of building a website is “keep it simple”..Weebly makes the whole process exactly that. I love it.

Hello!
You all are SUPER helpful — thank you!
I am wanting to re-create my photog website. Last year, I took a break from photography and thus shutdown my (squarespace) site. Now that I’m returning to photography, I am seeking a new site-builder as I (sadly) never fully “got” squarespace.”

When I first saw Wix, I thought, “Man, this is the builder for me. It’s beyond easy! I just edit the current elements, plug-in my stuff and go! ” But then I quickly learned that they’d pretty much own my stuff as there are no export website options. So the next on my list is Weebly, namely because of this and a few other reviews.

I am wanting to insert fun banners and tabs, whether they are included as options in the builder or whether I can insert my own custom elements. For example:
‘http://www.pinterest.com/pin/235946467952183527/
Can I do either in Weebly? Or is that why I might need to buy plug-ins on a site suchdivtagtemplates? OR do I need to by-pass weebly altogether and get a site through divtagtemplates?

You can certainly mimic the look of Pinterest by inserting images that look like rectangular banners into Weebly just by using their image element. However, you won’t get all the pinning or sharing capabilities just through these images. But you can certainly hyperlink the images to whatever webpage you want to.

So it’s a work around, but a pretty manual one as you will have to insert each picture one at a time and you will have to play with a lot of spacing to achieve a similar effect.

In terms of DivTag Templates (disclosure: we operate DivTag), it is a templates and design products provider in which the products work with Weebly websites.

The templates and add-on’s are built on top of Weebly, so even if you import a template, the way you would build out your website using Weebly’s drag and drop tools would not change at all. You can still create content using all of Weebly’s tools the same way as before. As such, it isn’t a separate website builder, as you will need to be using Weebly before you can use the template or add-on’s.

I have just started to build a blog on the free version of Weebly (not yet published) and I am wanting to get some profit out of it. I am a student and British, so don’t have any pounds let alone dollars and do not want to pay towards this. However I was wondering if my blog went big, would Weebly take all the profit from advertising or would I earn it, and is the only way I can make a profit from Weebly to pay? Finally do you have any mindboggling, life changing tips that will make my blog really, really good?
Thanks so much, this review was really good by the way!

As of October 2013, you no longer have to share any of your Google Adsense revenues with Weebly and you get to keep 100% of it. Prior to that, you would have to split your revenues with Weebly, but not any more.

Also, in addition to inserting Google Adsense, you can also insert advertisement banners that you arrange privately to earn commissions. For those, you don’t have to share anything with Weebly either.

I have been building sites for kids and such for a long time and Weebly is, hands down, the best site builder I have ever used. Its so easy to build fabulous pages that I dont understand the negative views. It makes adding html and code SO easy I can’t even fathom using another site builder again. It puts wordpress to shame, to be honest. Here is a wordpress site building page ‘www.creepypastapeeps.wordpress.com and here is the weebly page at ‘www.creepypastalegends.com. There’s no comparison to what you can do to a page and the freedom of control you have. I have no affiliation with them nor to ipage but after TEN years of creative site building I can attest to the wonder of Weebly and the ease of ipage and BOTH are worth every red cent, which also happens to be cheaper than other site builders. In LOVE with weebly. Thank god someone figured out how to cater to non-tech people like me so that I can produce great designs and have complete artistic control.

It should be safe, as if you use Weebly’s e-commerce store checkout (even with the free plan), they use SSL certificate in the checkout process so that all your customers’ data will be securely processed.

If you are just using a PayPal button, generated by PayPal’s codes, then your shoppers will be brought to PayPal’s checkout page, which will also be secure!

I have a question on online store website on Weebly.
I have set up my page, but I have a problem that cannot add new page into it. I can only edit the page that I have created before.
Is it because I must purchase to continue using the service of Weebly?
I don’t have this issue on my personal blog, but just the online store page.

Thanks for the great information. After reading your reviews of Squarespace and Weebly, I’d like to go with Weebly but have a question before I take the plunge (eying the MUSA template at Divtag)…

I’d be building a site for a sports organization/community that I’m a part of that needs to have a members only page or pages in addition to the regular pages that all can view. Is this possible with Weebly? Is there a plug in/widget that could handle this function?

I cam across your site and, as a happy Weebly.com user, I hope your review – and extended service will keep you and Weebly in business.

I am looking for a directory solution similar to Weebly; in that I can design and build without having any programming knowledge. I have checked with Weebly and I do understand that they do not have this option; I have asked for any referral that they might be able to offer.

Are you able to offer any referral(s) that can take a look at? I have not looked at your “template” and will just as soon as I submit this query. I am not looking for much. Simply the offer to my viewers to be able to enter data, have stored and then others to be able to view it. Minimal data entry points.

Thank you for any referrals that you might be able to offer and, if in looking at your templates, I find a solution I will contact you.

Thanks for your thoughts. I think in general it is always prudent to have a very strong password (alphanumeric, mixing lower & upper case letters, mixing in some symbols) and rotate the password every few months. And never pass around your password. That really helps eliminate a lot of threats.

But for sure, it would be an added peace of mind if SSL came along (they do have that for their e-commerce checkout cart). But I think most services that we use (and we use a lot of them), most of them don’t have SSL until you are purchasing something (such as when you enter sensitive credit card information).

Thansk for the excellent reviews – really very helpful !
Im a beginning artist and need a simple site. Squarespace looks great. However I d like to try and sell my prints – about 40 different ones bit likely to all be the same price – would these count as 40 different products – I assume not ! ?
many thanks Mike

With Squarespace, you can actually create “Product Variants” which are just variations of one single product. So in concept, you can sell 1 single product, just with 40 different variations. Worthwhile to try to clear that up with Squarespace’s support team? Or at least sign up for a trial account see first hand how it works! It just might work!

Thank you for your informative website. There’s so many options out there!!

Hoping you can help me with a question about Weebly… There are several website templates I like on ‘www.design-essentials.net but I’m not sure if they will work with weebly website builder. It states “Comes with PHP AND HTML versions” also “HTML & Photoshop (PSD) file” so I was thinking that the HTML code could be entered into weebly, but then it states “Required software: Adobe Photoshop 7+, or programs that will open PSD files; Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, or Adobe GoLive”

There are a lot of templates available to purchase online, but you need to find templates that are specifically built / tailored to work with Weebly, as Weebly has some unique code structures that needs to be considered.

What you can do is hire a developer / coder to help you take the template that you like and update the codes to make it compatible with Weebly. This is entirely possible.

Alternatively, you can also check out DivTag Templates [Disclosure: we operate DivTag Templates] as we have a number of premium templates that can also improve your designs.

There is so much value in this site, thank you for providing such in-depth, informative reviews. I’m going to apologize ahead of time for these detailed questions. I have been unable to find answers for them and hope you can help.

I feel stuck because I’m creating a number of different online businesses, some are linked together, some are completely unrelated. I just finished building a site with Squarespace and I realized I couldn’t create an email with my domain name in it. I got by, however, because that business is linked to another business where I can use my other business’s email which is hosted by Host Monster. But I still cannot create a click through email link on Squarespace, any idea how to do that?

Basically, for my other sites that I’m starting to build, I need a web builder with good e-commerce, the ability to create personalized domain email accounts (without having to use Google apps) and also integrate “if, then” marketing email capabilites (I want to be able to use email marketing software besides mailchimp). Do you have any recommendations? Does what I need exist?

If I own the domain name in GoDaddy, point it towards a web builder like Squarespace or Weebly, can I get the email service from GoDaddy or some other hosting company?

1) You can create a custom domain email address without using Google Apps (we use Google Apps because we like the Gmail interface). But Microsoft now offers you the ability to create an email address with your own custom domain for free. We went over this as a resource in our Free Top 8 Tools guide. So you can definitely still use that for your Squarespace site!

[April 26 2014 Update: Unfortunately Microsoft no longer offers you a free custom domain email address for free. You now have to sign up to Office 365, Microsoft’s premium online service, which also includes enterprise-class mail, collaboration and communication tools.]

2) Both Weebly and Squarespace ecommerce tools are fully integrated with Mailchimp. So if you want someone other than Mailchimp, check out Shopify and their App Store (our review here). Their Apps allow you to connect to different email marketing services.

3) You can set up email services with GoDaddy. But I’d give Microsoft a try as their “Hotmail” interface has been significantly updated and is quite functional! See my point 1 above.

I’ve used weebly for the past for the past five years and have been very pleased with the service. There are some things that weebly makes sure easy. Here are my favorites:

One
You can purchase a domain site name directly at weebly and when your done playing around with your design, you can just publish it from weebly. Saves a lot of time and money as far as I am concerned.

Two
While Weebly, Wix & Squarespace offer imbedding of files and through all the major services like sound cloud. What weebly does really well is allow you to upload and embed your own original MP3 files and also up to your own videos. You can them upload them, weebly will process them and you have another back up in case your you tube channel goes down.

Three
Their help center works well and they respond quickly.

While Wix looks a little “slicker,” you can also change your template in weebly anytime you want.

I’m looking for a simple platform but one that enables us to have L3 subnav. I see that squarespace doesn’t have that and probably won’t anytime soon. Does your platform give me the option creating L3 pages if needed?

Hi Connie and Jeremy,
Great website advice – thank you very much!
I have just bought a domain name through NameCheap.
I am starting a blog like a travel diary, but I find Blogger/Blogspot really awkward to use and Weebly looks perfect for what I need. (Clean, simple, drag and drop, WYSIWYG)
I want to use my .com domain name, but don’t know whether I am better off writing my blog through a blogging site like the Weebly blog, or just writing it in the website builder and updating it everyday as I would a blog post? Is there a difference in garnering an audience?
What would I miss out on by not using a blogging host like Blogspot (ie, the “Bloglovin'” blogging community, comments bar, sharing tools).

Finally, on other fashion blogs/websites I have seen widgets linking the reader to clothing sites (I suppose affiliate links) – is there a Weebly widget selection somewhere and I can choose a similar tool?

I am completely new to all of this and have really appreciated your site today!
Many thanks.

I think there are pros and cons to using a blog page and just a “normal” page in Weebly to build up your website. By using the blog page, you’re right that you will be able to take advantage of some “typical” blog functions, such as the social shares, able to categorize the posts, tag them, so that your readers can find related articles easily.

If you used a normal “page” structure to create your posts, then sometimes it’s hard for readers to find related topics, unless you insert specific “recommended / related posts” for each one of your articles.

But benefit of writing your posts on a “normal” page is that you have more flexibility to structure your pages, meaning that your articles don’t necessarily have to be “trapped” in a blog page if that makes any sense. You can insert a page anywhere on your website, under different menu items, make it a subpage, etc.

But the decision at the end of day is yours, as there really isn’t a right / wrong approach! Just consider how easy it is for you to manage (if you have 1000 posts, then maybe using the Blog Page structure is easy to manage / organize), and also your visitors’ user experience.

Hi, Connie and Jeremy-
Many thanks for this information; it’s really helpful. And, what a pleasure to come across a comments area that is both informative and reflects professional civility. Your article is very timely as I’m planning a workshop for teacher education students who want a user-friendly solution for web design. This will provide great information to them and also confirms my choice of Weebly for the workshop.

The question many of my students ask is if there is a limit on the number of pages for the free version. I’ve not see evidence or information to the contrary and hopefully I can accurately tell them “No, limit.” Is this the case?

Thanks for your feedback! The answer to your question is that there is no limit to how many pages you want to add to your Weebly site, even if you are using the free version of Weebly. Hope this helps!

I am running a small online business (beauty products) and now plan to have my own website. My business is running on pre-order basis (I do have small amount of ready stock), the website will be more or less like a products catalog with lots of photos and details.

I’ve just purchased a domain + website builder with godaddy for 2 years (because of sales promotion). Godaddy does not offers free test on website builder, so i thought it shouldn’t be that bad and paid for the plan. But after trying it yesterday I really hate it. Everything is so limited, fonts can’t be changed as you like, it’s limited to the template itself. The templates are really quite bad I would say. Wix is much better.

I’ve tried wix, it feels good but it loads kinda slow, does it? I’m in dilemma after reading your reviews on another 2.

If the website is to be a products catalog, which do you recommend?
If I would like to have shopping cart function, which will be better?

I would love to hear your opinion as I’m gonna cancel my godaddy website builder plan to request for refund and shift to other website builder.

I think Weebly will work well for you (they’re free to test out as well). You can easily drag and drop in images, text and set up products and shopping cart with Weebly.

If you are familiar with Wix already, then setting up your Weebly site won’t be an issue at all as I find the user interface of Weebly a bit more user friendly. Weebly also has a better e-commerce solution built into their platform (see our review here).

If I go with their FREE offer first as you say, what about a domain name? Should I get it from another seller or from them?

Also, are their websites STATIC HTML websites or I can create dynamic, I mean by that, a BLOG platform? In other words, can I use WEEBLY site as a blog like WP? I don’t want to initially go the route of WP.

Thanks for a great review of WEEBLY as I am ready to launch my own website this year (2014).

You can purchase your own domain name from registrars such as GoDaddy. Weebly’s support center has instructions on how to point your domain name from GoDaddy to Weebly, to connect your domain name to the website. A typical domain name runs for about $12 a year.

You can definitely create a blog website, but just know that Weebly’s blog functions are not as sophisticated as WordPress. WordPress has a lot of systems to allow you to manage your posts, but this is not to say that Weebly’s blog isn’t good.

Best thing to do is to sign up for a free account and get started with a blog page and see if you like it! You can always connect your domain name later as it’s free to start with Weebly and they give you a free subdomain address. So you can play around with things first.

1. With Pro I believe you get 10 websites per account. Does that mean you pay the same fee for each website? (I’m talking here about websites with a discreet domain name). Or do you literally get 10 websites for that one price…

2. Is the advantage of Design Platform the ability to preview? Is that it?

1) Since last year, you can have as many websites as you want under 1 single Weebly account, but you have to upgrade each website at a time if you wish to upgrade each site. See my notes in my comment below on January 7 2014.

2) Not only do you get to use the preview function for the designer platform, you have full control over how your clients access the site, restrictions to functionalities, and that your customers will not know that you are using Weebly. So basically you can run your designer business with the designer platform, and your customers will think that you are using your own proprietary software to build websites without knowing that it’s actually Weebly. You can then charge your customers whatever rates you wish to that way.

Hey Guys!
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this review, I found it very helpful! I am a hairstylist looking to create a website for brides, so I know absolutely nothing about design. I, of course, want to create a site where I am capture a lot of visitors, so I was leaning towards WIX since they have all the fancy templates. But after reading this review, I think I am leaning towards Weebly. Would you think that this is a best fit for what I am trying to do? I don’t need anything over the top, I just need a place to upload my work (pictures, slideshows), and talk about what I do. My concern with Weebly is if I may want to do a little more, I am not familiar with coding, and don’t think I want to hire anyone to help. So now my question is, will I be missing much by going with Weebly, and do they offer any adword credits with certain search engines? Thanks!!

Glad you found our articles helpful! I think at the end of the day, if you just want to have a simple website without touching any codes, both Weebly or Wix will be able to do the job just fine. Weebly does allow you to access HTML and CSS codes, but you certainly don’t have to touch it if you don’t want to.

Wix do have a more attractive set of templates than Weebly, but there is also DivTag Templates who offer premium templates that can be purchased separately (disclosure: we run DivTag Templates).

As for advertisment credits, Weebly offers $100 in Adwords credits if you upgrade to any one of their premium plans.

Hello Jeremy and Connie
I wish to build a web site with Weebly,our small archery club has one with verizon but they are getting out of the business . One is it passible to transfer our site right to weebly and also do the Weebly web sites allow you to have chat service. As you can tell I am very new to this.

Unfortunately there isn’t a way to import an existing site into Weebly. So you will have to copy the existing content and insert your images into Weebly. The main reason is that both website building systems / platforms are very different, so Weebly won’t be able to adopt the infrastructure that was used to build your existing site.

As for a chat function, Weebly doesn’t have this as part of their features. But what I’ve seen others do is use an external chat service, and incorporate it into a Weebly website.

hi guys,
first of all thanks for this useful site i will try to following all your topics from now and so on

i would like to ask you about the number of sites which allow to be created by one account
i have checked weebly and i found it only 10 sites max which will be allow to me i can create more than that!
so if i have a domain with them and starter or pro service can i have more or it fix with 10 only?
also how about squarespeace ,wix and other’s how many sites are there allow to me?

Since 2013, Weebly doesn’t have a limit on how many free websites you can build with them. You can have as many websites as you want under one user account.

However, if you want to upgrade to their Starter, Pro or Business accounts, you have to upgrade one website at a time. So for instance, you can have 20 websites within your Weebly account, but if you want to upgrade them to a premium plan, you have to upgrade each website at a time.

For Squarespace, Wix or other website builders, you have to set up a new user account for each website. So if you have multiple websites, using Weebly will help you manage your websites a bit easier.

In the past, you can use your own custom domain name even with the free version of Weebly. This changed about a few months ago and you now need to use at least their Starter Plan in order to connect the site to your own custom domain name. This is actually a very common practice amongst drag and drop website builders.

Weebly is really good. I initially tried to build my site from scratch and I spent an enormous effort just getting the bones for the site to work. Then I switched to Weebly and I was able to devote my energy to making an awesome site. Weebly took care of all the infrustructure freeing me to do what is important. Weebly is a terrific platform. It works really well and provides lots of advanced features. All are easily accessible in an intuitive way. I will never code a web site by hand again! (I know this sounds like a plug but I have nothing to do with Weebly other than being a Pro user. I am so happy with my experience that I want to share it with the world.)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I agree with you that Weebly makes it very easy and simple to start a website, and that you literally don’t have to touch codes. This really allows you to focus all your energy and efforts on building content, rather than worrying about backend technical stuff which can be very time consuming an draining.

If you want to build a simple website with some basic content set up (such as images, text, slideshows, videos, etc), Weebly is an excellent candidate as they are one of the most user friendly website builders I can recommend.

WordPress is much more powerful and flexible, but the learning curve is pretty steep and can be a drain on your time and resources. If you’re interested, check out our article about WordPress versus Weebly here.

I’m not entirely sure but Weebly that are hosted outside of Weebly.com (such as on Hostgator, iPage, etc) usually have their platform updated a bit later. For instance, when Weebly updated the user interface in June, it wasn’t until Nov / Dec that it was update for resellers.

That’s why I do encourage users to use Weebly.com directly as you get updates right away, and the support you get is probably better as they are more knowledgeable than those from the resellers.

Thank you so much for such a valuable web site
As a Scotsman albeit living in NZ I’m surprised you don’t have a “Make a donation” link.
Even as an allegedly frugal Scotsman I’d have chipped in with a few bob

For what it’s worth to other people looking for feedback on best website building programs
Here’s my thoughts.

I went with Weebly after I discovered I could get a somewhat similar Home Page (large) image as to what you can achieve with Squarespace.

Didn’t like the flicking between building the site and looking at it live on the internet as per Squarespace. Have to say that Squarespace lived up to their reputation of replying to emails within 24 hours.

Weebly is so unbelievably user friendly,

Another vital aspect of website building is how good are their servers? e.g. the Weebly servers.

I have a cr***y mobile broadband connection at home and when I go to check my website on an equally cr**Y connection at work. My website loads faster than many world famous media companies and international newspapers

Thanks for your kind words and encouragement! Just click on any of the social sharing buttons on the left hand side of the post to share our site with others – you never who else you can help!

Also thanks for sharing your experiences with both Weebly and Squarespace. It’s always great to hear about other people’s experiences. I agree with your point regarding Squarespace – that the switching back and forth of editing and publish view, but I also really like their one hour email response time policy. That’s really great service that not a lot of companies can deliver!

Through my research into which type of CMS / website builder would suit my client the best, I keep bumping into articles done by you guys.

Your articles are fantastic. I feel confident in making decisions after reading what you guys have said. I think I’ll go with Weebly after testing a large number of site since my client wants simple, simple, simple. Weebly is simple for an end-user with no website-building experience. Although the simplicity could be frustrating for a web developer, the option of customising CSS and HTML is excellent. When I see the great customisation tools from Wix, for example, I can visualize my client getting confused and frustrated immediately. KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid is his mantra. So that’s what I’ll do.

Also, I commend you guys on your dedication to answering or commenting on all the comment posts I have seen.

Thanks so much for your comment! I’d agree that Weebly is one of the easiest builders to use out there, and has all the basic tools to build a good website. Their HTML / CSS access allow more advanced users to get the customizations they want which is also excellent / flexible.

At the end of the day, they’re free to test (no time limit) so I’d encourage everybody to give them a shot, at least invest a couple of hours to see if it’s a good fit. No harm in investing a few hours to test them out if the plan is to build a long lasting website!

Thanks again for your feedback and please share our site with others who may also find our thoughts helpful! The social sharing buttons are on the left hand side

Thanks for your guyses website! I appreciate it **EXTREMELY!** really. Anyway, my question goes like this: If I want to offer people a service, let’s say I am a psychologist or a hypnotist, and I want to offer this service through my website… What on earth should I do? What would be the simple steps to take?

Would it go something like: Use google ad words to find a suitable brand name, Register the domain name, get hosting, build your website on one of these website builders?

Sorry if my question is inappropriate for this section or something, I’m just very very new to this… And it’s quite intimidating!!

Let me know sort of a simple “follow the dots” formula for someone like me who’s just starting out with a service they’d like to offer the world!!

Thank you!!** Any advice will be tremendously helpful!! And God bless you guys!!

I would start with a domain name (that matches your brand name) – you can get a domain name from GoDaddy for a very reasonable price.

Decide which website builder suits you the best. You can read our articles and test out a few website builders to see which one you like the most. If you are going to be building the site yourself and you don’t have much time to learn code or climb a steep learning curve, drag and drop builders like the ones we talk about on this site will help you save time and money.

After that, you can start building out your website. You should also think about ways to get traffic to your site. If you are mainly trying to drive traffic on the internet, you can either pay for traffic (Google Adwords, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, etc), or you can focus on “organic” traffic which is basically when someone finds you through a natural search on Google (or any other search engines).

There are plenty of discussions on SEO (search engine optimization) available on the internet. But you’ll need some time to weed out a lot of lower quality articles, but there are a lot of great ones too!

Great website,tons of useful information. I have been using the free trials of squarespace and weebly and everything written in your reviews on each website builder are very correct. I have a question in regards to making money with google adsense on squarespace and weebly.With weebly i read you split the profits 50/50 using google adsense,whereas with squarespace ,they don’t charge you anything for google adsense,is this true?

Hi. Really glad I found your site when looking for Weebly reviews – lots of great info! Thanks for this.

Do you know of anywhere on the Weebly site that lists all their features, i.e., for their free package and the Starter and Pro? I found the Starter vs. Pro comparison that you show in your review and their blurbs re features but am looking for a one-stop comparison of ALL the basic features plus the extras you get with the paid plans.

I’ve emailed Weebly about how hard it is even to find the Starter vs. Pro comparison and their full pricing package (6 months, 1 year, 2 years) but haven’t heard back yet. SInce this is one of their key selling points, I’d expect it to be front and center for anyone to check out before deciding to go with Weebly but you can’t see any of it without registering, and then it isn’t easy to find.

Thanks for your question and you’re right, what you get from Weebly’s Starter or Pro plans is not very clear from their pricing page. If you click to their “Support Center” (you can find this link on their website’s footer area), you’ll see what you get for Weebly Pro as the first item there.

But to get a complete picture including detailed pricing information (including how you can sign up for $2.99 per month for a Pro package), just sign up for an account which is absolutely free. When you are in the dashboard once you login, you can see a section on the right hand side on what they include as part of their premium packages.

There are no obligations or aggressive sales tactics to try to get you to upgrade, so signing up for a free account only requires your email address.

I am interested in building my online store with Weebly and I want to know more about how safe it is to wotk with it, considering that I will collect money trough this website. At what issues need to be especially careful when choosing a website platform for ecommerce?

You should consider the security of the payment processor in question, rather than the website builder. When your customers purchase products from your website, they will be paying through a payment processor that you install on your website (which won’t have anything to do with Weebly or other web builders).

For Weebly, they allow you to connect PayPal or Google Checkout, which are both reputable and leading transaction processors available. Transactions using both processors are encrypted.

Hi Brian – Weebly doesn’t come with email services, so you have to either use a free service (such as Gmail or Outlook / Hotmail), or you can subscribe to email services from Google Business App, so you can have your own custom email address. We have a few email accounts from Google Business App and they work really well. It’s a few dollars per month.

Do not pay a cent for Google app to host email. Instead, associate your domain with a free outlook.com account. It gives you 50 email address and you can request up to 450 more from Microsoft. You get free email, free cloud storage for documents and calendar. Go to http://domains.live.com/ to associate your domain. If you Google “http://domains.live.com/” you’ll find a bunch of pages explaining how to do this.

Hey Josue – wow great find! Thanks so much for advising us about this. I didn’t know Outlook now provides this service.

I read a few blog articles about it and looks like it works very well. I know that Outlook has improved their user interface tremendously (since I also have an old school Hotmail account). The only downsides that a particular post mentioned, is that Outlook has slightly more intrusive ads, and if your account remains dormant for a year, it gets shut down. But those aren’t huge points if it’s a free service.

Great review! Quick question: I need to aggregate my content from 4 different blogs under one personal page (maybe an RSS importer filtered by author). In addition, I just want to sell one product — a t-shirt available in different sizes. (Squarespace wants $24/month just ecommerce in general but I just have one product!)
Are any of the major website builder sites set up for both of these requirements?
Thanks for your help — been browsing the site for some time now!

Do you mean that you are using Weebly through Hostgator? Generally speaking, some advantages of using Weebly directly through Weebly.com as their platform is the most updated with the latest tools. Also, if you are using Weebly through another host, they usually restrict the number of pages you can build (I think to 5 or 6), you have to pay a monthly hosting fee, and to import any external templates, have access to editing their HTML / CSS codes (if you ever want to customize some parts of your design – or hire someone toe) or use their e-Commerce tools, you have to upgrade to their premium plans.

So if you need a bit more handholding, Hostgator will be able to provide that through their 24/7 support. But if you tend to be able to work through things yourself, using Weebly directly will be less expensive, with updated tools.

So glad to have found your site! I want to have a site that gives info on health and beauty subjects. It will have a great deal of different subjects so I need a site that allows me to have categories and sub-categories (I guess that means lots of ‘pages’?) along with links to content and videos from other sites. At the beginning I don’t plan on personally selling anything from this site but will want to include links where people can purchase the things I talk about. What builder do you suggest? I am a complete newbie to site building but am not adverse to spending some time learning.

This all leads to the question of what’s the best way for people make money from information websites? I know there are things like affiliate programs and Google Adsense. Researching that question brings up so much info that it’s overwhelming to determine what to start out with.

Weebly is definitely the easiest builder to use, based on our own experiences. If you are just building content and need to build a lot of pages, Weebly can cater to that. But if you want a very sophisticated system, you’ll probably need to use a much more flexible (yet complicated) content management system (CMS) such as WordPress.

There are plenty of ways to make money with websites, and using affiliate links, Google Adsense, or even creating your own products are all viable options. It’s a huge topic with plenty of knowledge out there in the internet so I won’t dive into it!

Hi,
Im looking to set up a small website to sell my hand painted furniture and art…
I have a moonfruit site already but it only lets you list 10 products on the free account and at the moment I cant afford to start paying.
Do weebly and Wix also have product restrictions on the free accounts??
(I know jimdo has a limit of 5!!!)

Hi. Your reivews are VERY helpful. I’m up against a problem and would like to ask one question about Weebly.

On our website, we will have images with text that is a part of the image. I want to insert invisible ‘click boxes’ over some of the text that when clicked on will take people to that page of the site.

Is this even possible in Weebly? If not, what builder would you recommend that is as easy to use as possible?

Thank you for the review. This is very useful for someone who is not experienced in building a website and starting a new SMB like myself. You have helped me make my decision of using Weebly and ensuring me it will meed my needs.

Hi, thanks for that thorough review. I think you have me convinced. Just wasted far too much time trying to make Wix work for me. My brother “Odd Job Army” was right when he recommended Weebly, it seems, even though the 123Reg domain registration place he also suggested has proven to be fraudulent, so there you go. Best regards, Paul Hodgson

Hi just reading your reviews of Wix v Weebly. I have been with Wix for several years but am now , the looking for a new company because there are just too many pitfalls with Wix. Yes the site has all the bells and whistles but at the end of the day when you constantly lose days where you should be concentrating on your business and not trying to resolve issues that clearly can not be resolved by you, then it is of no use.

Their customer service is appalling, basically shrug their shoulders at you and it must be a problem at your end. I went onto their Facebook page because I was getting nowhere on the forums or with the so called support and asked what the problem was and why couldn’t I load my editor and got “I don’t know!!!”. I was already angry enough at having lost several days not being able to update my site, that just capped it for me. I did a little research and found that this has been a problem for others for weeks. The SEO for your site is not good, the mobile site does not reflect your site, if it shows up at all and your website is not compatible to all social media, I wish I had steered well clear of them. So here I am as I have no doubt several others are this afternoon wasting yet more time looking for another option.

So no if I had known what I know now I would never have gone with Wix.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. I’m sorry to hear about it. Our experience with Wix was pretty pleasant, but that was just our own experience. Maybe we were lucky enough to get a support person who valued service?

In any case, it’s good to hear a balanced case for Wix – so thanks for sharing. Good luck for your next website builder! Do share your experiences with us again!

I’ve decided to try out weebly to create a website. I wanted to upload onto my new site, a PDF that I created so that visitors could download and print the file.

The file is just under 57,000 KB and it’s telling me I’m limited (in free version) to 10 MB. I tried loading it as a document. Is there some other way I can (or should) try to upload? I’m thinking that if a video can be embedded than surely a PDF can fit.

There must be some way that visitors can access and print a PDF regardless of size and without having to upgrade?

You can try to ask Weebly’s support team to see if there are any alternatives, but as far as I am aware of, you’ll need to upgrade to either their Starter or Pro plans to upload either 250 MB (Pro) or 100 MB (Starter) files. Although storage space doesn’t cost as much as before, it still costs money for Weebly to provide services and support their users.

This information is very helpful, I’m looking for a website that is easy to build, and this seems to be a good choice. However, I do need a shopping cart on it that’s also easy to use. Is there something you can recommend that’s as easy to build as Weebly, but maybe has a better shopping cart system built in? Thanks.

We don’t have any reviews of shopping cart plugins, but if you just Google “Weebly Shopping Carts” you’ll find a few that works (compatible with Weebly). I haven’t used them before, but I’ve seen some of them in action and they appear to provide a lot more e-commerce functions than what Weebly offer at the moment. The drawback is that the shopping cart is a 3rd party plugin and so not fully integrated with Weebly.

On a budget, and would like to build my own website (I have used blogger & WordPress).
This is a website mainly photos with links, where registered users can submit their photo w/links.
Just like: http://www.tastespotting.com – this is a food submission site.

Hi Fides – if you want the function where people can register and submit photos, then Weebly probably won’t have the right tools for you. Weebly is great for setting up basic websites, but if you want more functionality, you’ll have to look for external widgets.

The downside of WordPress, is although it is a much more flexible and powerful platform for building websites, the learning curve is much higher. Also, if you want the WordPress website to look a certain way, you’ll have to know how to modify codes to adjust the design. With Weebly, you can drag and drop elements to re-arrange content very quickly and you can do it yourself.

I switched to Weebly Pro…from a WP Blog….I’m thrilled with the ease of use and then there is the learning curve when you want to add a widget like rafflecopter…not sure how to proceed…but I’m much happier with WeeblyPro than WP…I’m a busy, small business owner….I don’t have the time or resources for an IT department….Thank for your thorough review~

Is there a charge for a search engine or can people get to site throught the site address registered with weebly?
This site looks great. I have a web site but am thinkong about changing due to cost and non corresponing sales

If you are referring to Weebly’s free subdomain address (such as della.weebly.com), most people prefer to get their own domain address (through GoDaddy, for example) so they can brand their own website accordingly.

I’m not entirely sure if using your own domain name or Weebly’s subdomain will have any search engine results impact, but we’ve seen Weebly websites using Weebly’s subdomain name (so they didn’t have their own domain address) rank very well for specific keywords – so it’s possible to do well in search engines. It all comes down to creating really good content, and promoting these content to other people / websites.

Hi Farina – I don’t think Weebly has a registration function. However, they do have a Forum element that you can try to see if you like it. There are also membership login functions that are compatible with Weebly. The one that I know is Sentry Login which DivTag Templates talk about here – http://divtagtemplates.com/resource/members-login/

I’m looking to build a website for my business and i’ve been quoted extremely high prices from freelance designers and website designing agencies so would love to be able to try and put something together myself.

Weebly sounds great but i just wondered a couple of things:

1) is there a limit on how many HD videos you can have on your site?

2) is there a way to make the website protected so only paid members can view the content?

Would really appreciate any information you have regarding these two queries.

1) I plan on having lots of short HD clips will this slow down the running of the site? Will it also effect the building of the site? I know it takes time to upload videos but once uploaded will that still slow down how everything else runs while building?

2) Sentrylogin looks perfect for what I’m making. Will this prevent members from downloading my videos? Or does Weebly prevent this? Obviously i don’t want paid members taking the content.

I’m sure I’ll probably think of more questions to ask you in the future. Once again I really appreciate any help you can give me.

1) I’m not entirely sure about this but just be aware that Weebly is a shared host so it won’t be as fast as a dedicated host (which is very expensive on a monthly basis). I “suspect” it won’t affect your site that much as long as your HD videos are not all loading and playing at the same time.

2) I think you should contact Sentry Login directly as they will be able to give you an accurate answer there

I truly appreciate the reviews that you have written recently, especially in regards to WIX vs. Weebly, as I am new to website building. I used to work as a graphic designer through a large format printing company, and have been a freelance graphic artist for some time now, but coding, website maintenance, etc, are all new to me.

I have a quick question… forgive my confusion, but I have been put in charge of developing a website for a new company that I currently work for. I’ve been informed that we have already purchased a domain name and a server, but are still lacking a physical site. As a designer, I’ve been set as the point person for this project. After reading Weebly’s review, I gather that I would lean more towards using them versus WIX, as I can back-up and move the site at any time.

My question is this: If I build a website for free on Weebly, am I able to then export it and easily transfer it to our already purchased domain, or can I use said domain in conjunction with Weebly without having to export/move what I create within their system. I suppose I’m a bit confused on how the server, domain name, website builder, etc. all link up. I hate to bother you with such questions, but after reading your articles, it’s clear that you would be someone who may be able to help determine my next step.

Yes, Weebly does allow you to export your Weebly website so you can use it to either create a backup copy on a regular basis (just to be safe), or export and import it into another host. However, as mentioned in our Wix vs Weebly article (http://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/wix-vs-weebly-which-website-builder-is-better/), once your website is outside of Weebly’s operating / hosting environment, you will no longer be able to use Weebly tools to make edits. You will need to be able to edit the codes in order to make modifications. One workaround is to make your changes in Weebly, export again,and import again into your own host.

For your latter question, about how server, domain name and website builder link up, they are 3 different things.

Weebly is the website builder that provides you with the tools to build a website. At the same time, they also provide hosting for you (the server). Domain name is your URL (e.g. www. yourdomain. com). When you purchase a domain name, you own it.

I did not expect this task to feel so daunting, especially coming from a background in graphic design, but there was (and still is) a lot of vocabulary that I was not familiar with, and it was hard to find a real person, with actual “on-the-job” learning experience who was able/willing to help. I truly appreciate your reply, and after reading your “About Us” section, want to congratulate you two on your accomplishments.

I’ll be sure to refer anyone who may be interested in site building to your page. May you two continue to enjoy a successful and prosperous future.

It’s our pleasure Steve. It could be a bit daunting at the beginning, but keep at it and things will start to make sense. To be honest we didn’t have a website building background but just through pure trial & error and committing hundreds of hours into testing different website builders for our various projects, we started building up our expertise.

Great reviews! I just tried Wix, and didn’t realize you couldn’t export it. That said, the website was super easy to create, and looks beautiful. The only thing is there aren’t a lot of calendar and event builder options other than google calendar and one simple Wix event page. I’m going to try Weebly as well and see which one is better.

Yes, Wix is pretty easy to use once you give it a good try. But its lack of ability to export your website is indeed a drawback…. but most website builders share the same issue.

I believe it has to do with the fact that because Wix doesn’t have any “structure” in that you can literally drag and drop any elements into pretty much anywhere in its website, this makes exporting not very realistic as other external hosts may have issues adapting.

Further, there are a lot of Wix functions that simply won’t “survive” outside of its own environment.

Having said that, it is still a very solid website builder. But as I mentioned in my reviews, make sure you give several website builders a good try before committing, which sounds like exactly what you’re doing!

hey i made my site from weebly and bought a domain for it. this morning i tried to edit the site but now the changes do not appear even when i changed the settings and put the domain i bought on that site i need your help please

Hi Joseph – if you need any technical support for Weebly, you can reach out to their support team at [email protected], or leave a message on their Facebook page which they do respond to fairly quickly.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

[…] Weebly is one of the most popular website builders around today. It’s intuitive, easy to use, and has a broad range of templates. However, if you have a complex e-commerce site, Weebly isn’t the builder for you, as it just doesn’t have the advanced tools to handle those needs. A review of Weebly’s pros and cons can be found at Website Builder Expert. […]

About Us

Maybe just like you, at first we didn't have a darn clue about how to build a website, nevermind write half a line of code if our life depended on it!

We wanted to build a website to start a side business, and felt overwhelmed, confused & scared about how to actually do it, which builder to use, and making wrong decisions. After years of trials & errors using different website builders, we're here to share our experiences with you.